The present invention relates to a method and apparatus for communicating and controlling various types of business office equipment or devices transparently and uniformly. The types of business equipment could be copiers, facsimiles and/or printers.
The creation of business office devices such as a copier, facsimile or printer requires activities assigned to various groups which must be integrated into at a certain time. In addition, once the device goes to customers, it must be maintained by a field service group. Therefore, different groups of people work together to develop and maintain the product.
The current trend of using microprocessors in business devices increased the capability of the devices. For example, high speed copiers usually have more than one microprocessor performing various tasks, including an operation panel consisting of many buttons and displays, controlled by a microprocessor.
As the use of microprocessors increases, a shortage of software engineers becomes critical. Fathi and Armstrong (1985) showed the cost ratio of development between hardware and software as 1 to 5.3. The current practice of developing devices, particularly stand-alone devices such as copiers, tends to ignore reusability of software across different models. For example, an operation panel of a copier is programmed by an engineer who develops the software of the main controller. The software is closely tied to a particular model and usually cannot be used by other copier models. If this trend does not change, the development of various modules by different groups cannot be easily integrated. Moreover, the shortage of software engineers is likely to limit the number of product developments and modification.